Few artists could make a viewer’s mouth water in quite the way that Bay Area figurative artist Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021) did with his sumptuous renderings of cakes, pies, candy, ice-cream cones, and sandwiches from the early 1960s, when he was tipped as a rising star of Pop Art. Rendered in a soft pastel impasto that looks like frosting, Thiebaud’s ranked arrays of confections beckoned viewers like goodies in a bakery.
But while his efforts were initially lumped in with those of Pop artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist, notably in curator Walter Hopps’s 1962 exhibition “New Paintings of Common Objects” at the Pasadena Art Museum, Thiebaud’s place in American art was something of a puzzle: On the one hand, his work spoke to the rampant consumerism occasioned by a postwar prosperity ignited by waves of returning veterans joining the middle class. On the other hand, his work didn’t deal with brands (as Warhol did with Campbell’s Soup and others) or the mass media. There was no way to read a implicit criticism of pop culture into Thiebaud’s canvases, the way one could with, say, a painting like Rosenquist’s F-111 (1964–65).
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And then there was his technique. The effects of Thiebaud’s thick swirls of pigment were far removed from the slick facture of Warhol’s silkscreened paintings, Lichtenstein’s benday dots, and the broad, smooth brushwork that Rosenquist brought from his days as a commercial billboard painter.
Claes Oldenburg was, perhaps, the Pop artist who came closest to sharing Thiebaud’s sensibility. The subject matter of his “soft” sculptures—Brobdingnagian versions of quotidian objects stitched together from vinyl and stuffed with kapok fiber—often included foodstuffs such as hamburgers, French fries, and yes, slices of cake. But even here, the analogy with Thiebaud was imprecise.
The truth is, for all his associations with Pop Art, Thiebaud was really a kind of quirky realist, putting him in league with figurative artists such Alex Katz or Philip Pearlstein. More interestingly, Thiebaud’s oeuvre echoed that of another Northern California painter, Robert Bechtle, who, like Thiebaud, tuned in to the cultural reverberations of America’s booming suburbs.
A retrospective of Thiebaud’s work will be on view at the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, through May 21, 2023.
Source: artnews.com